The artist Femmy Otten (1981) succeeds in conquering the museum with her wood-carved artworks. With her impressive solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, she lifts wood sculpting out of the realm of craftsmanship by exploring major themes such as sexuality, womanhood, motherhood and vulnerability.
The largest and most eye-catching sculpture at the exhibition is ‘We Once Were One’. From a substantial trunk of lime wood she carved a torso of a friend from the past, a female body as never seen before. The belly is formed by an enormous vulva, including clitoris. A penis on the back of the head functions as a bun of hair. At the edge of the hall lie the wood chips that the artist carved away and saved.
The tree is a woman
In a revealing poem that Femmy wrote about this sculpture, she explains both her themes and her love of wood as a material.
“the tree is a woman / shaped by rings / one each year
there are hairs that are also tears
on her chest I depict venus lips, these lips are reminiscent of a cloak
the opening of the cloak spreads over her entire belly / because we once were one.
memory, the time that acts on it, the holes, the emptiness that forms and the body that carries it / reminds us / how shame may be overcome
wood never produces a shrill vibration but deep warmth / the chronology of time is gone / the importance of empty moments in time / the importance of empty spaces / and the personal in that rhythm
when the volcano explodes / images turn around”
The source of life
The main sculpture of the solo exhibition is the introduction to an account of her life, with wooden sculptures showing how she went from young woman to mother. Here too, wood is functional again, showing the softness with which her unborn child is wrapped and protected by her belly, yet so delicate and defenseless. In a room with wood carving further on, the artist captures the birth of her daughter. Otten makes it a ritual experience, referring to the source of life, the origin. The primal power of birth is almost tangible, also through painted seascapes depicting the amniotic fluid, even hidden and solidified in synthetic resin that she poured into one of the sculptures.
Return of the narrative
After the Italian Giuseppe Penone, who made an important contribution to the revaluation of wood carving art with his dissection of industrial tree trunks, Otten goes a step further. She uses the natural warmth of the wood, but also materials such as human hair, to strengthen the vulnerability of her own life story.
Also special is the return of the figurative in art, now that all the corners and lines of abstract art have been explored. Storytelling, the narrative, is given room again. Finally, and fitting for this time. But unlike the greats in wood carving around the year 1500, such as the German Riemenschneider, elements of surrealism have crept into her work; a head that weighs as ballast on the foot of her self-portrait as a pregnant woman. Or the Egyptian-looking half human- half animal figures standing on her shoulders whispering, one with an erect penis.
So deep and sensitive is this exhibition that Otten burst into tears during her opening speech. She exposes ten years of her life, all those blissful but also deeply unhappy hours alone in her studio in The Hague. How she tried to hold on to time and had to let go again, ‘ended up in the ditch and was pulled out again’. She doesn’t just show her vulnerabilities in her sculptures, she lives them too.
“In search of love”
“All my fear and sexuality I put on the table,” she promised the full foyer of the museum in Schiedam. The same museum also presented Jan Erik Visser earlier, who processes his inorganic waste into sculptures that seem to have emerged from his subconscious. Also beautiful, groundbreaking work, in a brave museum.
“I am searching for elementary love,” Otten also said. How beautiful that she chose precisely wood as the most important material for this. Wood carving art had been haughtily banished by the formal urban art world and the art bible Jansons to private exhibition spaces and local art markets.
The exhibition ‘We Once Were One’ can be seen from January 28 to June 25, 2023 at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam.
